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More than half of technology executives in the 2019 Gartner CIO Survey say they intend to employ AI before the end of 2020, up from 14% today. If you’re moving too slowly, a competitor could use AI to put you out of business. But if you move too quickly, you risk taking an approach the company doesn’t truly know how to manage. In a recent report by NewVantage Partners, 75% of companies cited fear of disruption from data-driven digital competitors as the top reason they’re investing. Answering these questions requires expertise in technology. But you can’t just add a tech expert to the board and count on him or her to keep the rest of the board up to speed.

Need more convincing that it will soon be impossible to tell whether a video of a person is real or fake? Enter Samsung’s new research, in which a neural network can turn a still image into a disturbingly convincing video. Researchers at the Samsung AI center in Moscow have achieved this, Motherboard reported Thursday, by training a “deep convolutional network” on a large number of videos showing talking heads, allowing it to identify certain facial features, and then using that knowledge to animate an image. (ed note: We all must inform others that this technology has arrived – it has the power to mislead and to bring about very serious consequences).

75% of the top 20 fastest-growing skills were new to the index in Q1 2019. The 20 fastest-growing freelance skills in Q1 2019 experienced more than 170 percent year-over-year growth, while demand for the top 10 skills grew more than 370 percent year-over-year.

I have found that the best way to stay abreast of changes is to subscribe to blogs and newsletters that have a short synopsis of the reports they post. Reading pertinent headings will help you decide which articles you want to dive into deeper. I read them for half an hour every morning and it helps me stay up to date. – Afshin Doust, Advanced Intelligent Systems Inc.

Universities continue to be “highly vulnerable” to cyberattacks, but those most at risk also tend to have the financial resources to protect themselves, according to a new report from Moody’s Investors Service. Institutions house a wide range of student records, sensitive research and medical information in potentially leaky networks. Additionally, that data is often dispersed among several campuses with “countless access points” on each; global interconnectedness also poses a risk. However, budget constraints may make it difficult for colleges to keep up their defenses as threats grow more complex. Moody’s identified 101 data disclosures at U.S. institutions in 2017, an increase from 15 in 2014. It expects the “upward trend” to continue.

Chatbot–based customer services are increasingly in demand. Advancements in AI technology, natural language processing, neural networks and speech recognition are making chatbots more effective and affordable. However, they are still in an early phase of development. These revolutionary applications – which allow users to engage in interactive conversations using text or natural voice – have the potential to save businesses a fortune – over 8 billion annually by 2020 according to Juniper.

Non-degree certificates convey substantial economic value, including higher employment rates and income, greater marketability and more personal satisfaction. Those are the key results from a just-released survey of about 50,000 working adults between the ages of 25-64. The survey focused on respondents who did not have a college degree and were not attending college. The study was conducted by the Strada Educational Group and Gallup as part of their Education Consumer Survey, and the report, “Certified Value: When Do Adults Without Degrees Benefit From Earning Certificates and Certifications?” was published by Strada and the Lumina Foundation.

IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global) and Credential Engine today announced a partnership designed to advance new interoperability and transparency standards for credentials and institutional data systems. Through the new agreement, the organizations will build interoperability between IMS Global’s widely-adopted standards and Credential Engine’s Credential Transparency Description Language (CTDL)—the first and only common language that enables credential issuers to publish data and information on the content and value of credentials to the public Credential Registry and the open web. Already, 12 states and regions, nearly 400 credential providers, and several federal agencies have joined this cloud-based library that makes information such as competencies, cost, quality assurance, earnings, and connections to occupations, and pathway information searchable to the public.

by Rahul Choudaha, AACSB Blog
The impact of today’s megatrends—long-term, transformational processes with broad reach and influence—is driving a reconstruction of the higher education sector. The changing nature of work and widening skills gap, as a couple of megatrend examples, are instilling a sense of urgency among many business schools to assess their portfolio of academic offerings and curriculum. One such call for adaptation and assessment is emerging in the form of digital credentialing. What are the drivers and implications of digital credentialing? How can business schools prepare for a shifting landscape of credentialing and its relevance to workplace skills?

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology
Does online learning spend more on technology and less on people? That’s the latest question posed by Eduventures Chief Research Officer Richard Garrett, in an essay published on the Encoura website. This was a follow-on to a recent brief he posted that examined whether online learning could help institutions deliver a lower-cost education to more students. In that setup, he concluded that the higher the portion of fully online students a school had, the less the school spent per student. In his latest analysis of IPEDS data, Garrett specifically examined the situation of private, nonprofit four-year schools (while suggesting that the outcome could be applied to public four-year institutions as well).

Designed with unusually detailed guidance from major businesses in the Washington region, the digital tech credential aims to certify that graduates have knowledge and skills in fields such as statistics, data visualization and cybersecurity. The credential program debuted this year at George Mason and Virginia Commonwealth universities. American University, the University of Richmond and Virginia Tech plan to launch comparable programs in the fall, and more schools may follow. The credential is outside of higher-education tradition: It is neither a major, nor a minor, nor a formal certificate. It is, rather, a recognition that students have taken a short sequence of courses (five at GMU) that cover knowledge and skills in high demand.

Sebastian Thurn, Founder, and CEO at Udacity, is not shy when he claims, in a recent post, that his company will become the “University of Silicon Valley”. “Only 4% of students ever complete a MOOC. At present, our Nanodegree programs have a 34% graduation rate, thanks to the tireless efforts of the hard-charging Udacity team. When paired with our new personalized mentorship programs in past experiments, cohorts have commonly exceeded 60% graduation rates.” (…) “For our Nanodegree Plus pilot, an independent accounting firm verified that among our career-seeking and job-ready graduates, 84% found a new, better job within six months of graduation. And for that 84 %, the salaries went up, by an average of $24,000 per person. So much that on average, those students recouped their entire Udacity tuition fee in just three weeks.” (…) “No other online learning platform provides this level of end-to-end personalized mentorship.”

Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review
We’ve touched previously on the concept of adversarial examples—the class of tiny changes that, when fed into a deep-learning model, cause it to misbehave. In recent years, as deep-learning systems have grown more and more pervasive in our lives, researchers have demonstrated how adversarial examples can affect everything from simple image classifiers to cancer diagnosis systems, leading to consequences that range from the benign to the life-threatening. A new paper from MIT now points toward a possible path to overcoming this challenge. It could allow us to create far more robust deep-learning models that would be much harder to manipulate in malicious ways.

Kimberly A. Whitler, Forbes
For some time, AI has been the “hot” topic among marketers, technologists, and nearly everyone else, receiving an out-sized amount of media attention and buzz. In a discussion with Kipp Bodnar, CMO of HubSpot, a leading growth platform, he indicates that it’s hard for businesses to distinguish between hype and reality. The result is that a lot of companies throw resources at an opportunity that doesn’t materialize. Below are Bodnar’s thoughts on how marketers can distinguish between what’s possible and what’s not.

Nadine Burquel and Anja Busch, University World News
The internationalisation of higher education has opened up exciting opportunities for higher education institutions to make major transformations to their teaching and learning process: exposure to different cultures expands considerably the type of knowledge that is delivered through the education process, bringing new perspectives to the classroom. Internationalisation offers great opportunities for student mobility through exchanges, degree mobility, internships, study visits and summer schools. Academic mobility enhances the international cross-fertilisation of ideas to advance knowledge for new cutting-edge research.

Tom Simonite, Wired
The brouhaha over Europe’s guidelines for AI was an early skirmish in a debate that’s likely to recur around the globe, as policymakers consider installing guardrails on artificial intelligence to prevent harm to society. Tech companies are taking a close interest—and in some cases appear to be trying to steer construction of any new guardrails to their own benefit. Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler warned in the journal Nature this month that “industry has mobilized to shape the science, morality and laws of artificial intelligence.”

When looking to reskill or upskill workers, most companies turn first to formal training options via online courses or outsourced experts. But don’t overlook the valuable resources right under your roof. The folks behind the educational technology company Degreed found that 55% of workers go to their peers first when they want to learn a new skill. In their book The Expertise Economy, executives at Degreed espouse the “learning loop” as an effective peer-to-peer learning tool. The four stages — gain knowledge, apply the knowledge, get feedback and reflect on what you have learned — can all happen in a peer-to-peer setting.

At ASU, we are advancing our own approach to Universal Learning, which integrates online learning, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, game-based learning, entrepreneurship, public and private sector partners, and global alliances to design accessible education pathways for students of all learning levels at any point in their lives. We are currently developing a series of demonstration projects, student success programs, and employee learning models to position ASU as a future-ready leader.